


I Miss New Wave

by seekingsquake



Series: Beautiful Midnight [4]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Banner Feels, Bruce Banner Has Issues, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Depression, F/M, I'm hurting my own feelings, Multiple Suicide Attempts, On a scale of one to Bruce Banner how much do you hate yourself today?, Suicidal Tendancies, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Tony's a good friend, maybe more than a friend, non linear narration, non-graphic drug use, non-graphic orgy, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 13:24:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2389856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce admitted to it once, because that's the only one he really remembers. But he's tried it three times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Miss New Wave

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song I Miss New Wave by Matthew Good.
> 
> I am not affiliated with Marvel, or Matthew. I am the owner of absolutely nothing.  
> Please do not repost or reupload this piece anywhere without consent. If you ask, I'm sure we can work something out :]
> 
> Special thanks to Werevampiwolf for helping me get Tony in order.

The first time it happened, Bruce didn’t really know he was doing it. Looking back on it now, he can’t remember what he was thinking or what it felt like, can only draw conclusions from what he thinks it must have looked like. And in his memories, it really looks like he was trying to kill himself.

It was his first year on the run, and a lot of those memories all blur together after a while so he doesn’t remember how he found himself in Hawaii, but he knows that’s where he was. He was in a cheap motel that took his cash without question. It was dingy and rundown and a low level of disgusting. He hadn’t left his room in three days, and that suited him just fine. The window was open, and a cool sea breeze fluttered against the dirty cream of the drapes. It wasn’t too hot, but the humidity had his t-shirt clinging to his thin frame like a second skin, and he’d shed his pants a day or two ago and had never put them back on. There’s a movie on the television, something German with badly timed subtitles. He remembers now that it was called The Experiment, that it was based off of something real, and that even though he wanted to, he couldn’t bring himself to turn it off.

The original experiment, the one that the movie was based off of, was conducted back in the early ‘70’s by a psychologist. He remembers Amelia reading about it back in the mid ‘90’s; she’d always been more interested in the people based soft sciences than he or Betty had been. He had listened to her with a distracted sort of interest, fiddled around with his equations and simulations as she rambled about the implications of this Zimbardo guy’s findings. She’d gotten into a verbal debate with herself about the sort of ethics used to justify human experimentation, in both hard and soft sciences, and Bruce only really started paying attention when Betty started adding to the conversation.

“When he saw that people were getting hurt, when he saw that there was a severe negative psychological impact on these men, when he noticed that even he was experiencing side effects, the experiment should have been forfeit,” Amelia was saying, with an angry passion in her eyes and her fingers curled into fists in her lap.

“At the cost of the integrity of the experiment?” Betty’s eyes were alight with barely restrained challenge. She had always loved playing devil’s advocate, loved riling both Bruce and Amelia up by posing questions designed to dig under their skin and burrow into their thought processes.

“Damn the experiment’s integrity!” Amelia nearly shrieked. “It was dangerous, and the psychological changes that happened in these men happened quickly and drastically. What about the integrity of the test subjects? What about the integrity of his career? I’m just so-,”

Bruce fiddled around with the figures on his computer screen some more, jotted down a few notes, bit the inside of his cheek and furrowed his brow. His simulation wasn’t projecting the numbers he’d expected it would and he couldn’t figure out where he’d gone wrong. “Isn’t the whole point of psychology to figure out how the brain works, and how that affects everything else? So it’d be important to note what actions set negative reactions in effect, and then work through the how and why, no? So isn’t it his duty to see it through, and get as thorough of an understanding of that particular phenomenon as possible? He could then apply to have his findings implemented in real prisons, and improve the quality of life for real prisoners, could he not?”

“Ame, didn’t you say that the experiment only lasted six of the intended fourteen days?” Betty asked.

Amelia nodded, but still insisted, “It still went on for too long,” while Bruce snorted and plowed over her with, “How useless is that! They didn’t even get halfway through.”

“People were getting hurt, Bruce,” Amelia stated darkly, her eyes narrowed at him from across the room.

Bruce had shrugged then, and said, “I think that most of the time, a few people getting a little hurt is worth the pursuit of knowledge, don’t you? The more we know as a population, the better we’ll be. Knowledge is enlightenment, isn’t it? Besides, it's not like anybody died; there weren't even any physical altercations, were there?"

He sat in that motel room with that stupid movie playing on the oldest television he’d ever seen, and he felt ridiculously naive and sick to his stomach as he thought back to those days. He’d been having trouble sleeping since the incident, and was swallowing sedatives and sleeping pills in abundance every night. It never worked, and he speculated then that his metabolism had changed and sped up to such speeds that normal drugs at normal doses wouldn’t work on him anymore. That night, with that movie playing and the ocean breeze blowing in, it was with an urgent sense of desperation that he downed the contents of the brand new bottle, two hundred pills in a couple of swallows, washed down with a bottle of beer that tasted sort of like dish soap. He remembers wandering into the bathroom and starting a bath, settling into the tub still wearing his t-shirt and briefs, and he remembers sinking below the surface of the water and looking up. He watched the ceiling ripple, and listened to the roar of the water from the faucet, and he doesn’t remember much else of that day.

He woke up that night naked on the beach outside his room. The moon was high, the water was cold on his bare skin, and he ached. He told himself that it was a physical sort of pain, but he knows now that it was more than that. He left Hawaii on the first flight out the next morning, not even caring where he was going as long as it was away. It wasn’t until his plane was touching down in some country that he wasn’t paying attention to the name of when he realized that that movie had finished without him. He wondered what happened.

He wondered what would happen to him.

✧✧✧

Bruce is more than reluctant when Tony drags him out to Malibu. Neither of them had been doing too well, floundering around in New York like every breath was hard won and every night was a battle in a never ending war. Tony came down to the labs each morning looking like he’d gotten his ass kicked. Bruce had stopped looking in mirrors weeks ago because he knew that he was losing these battles as well, and that it showed on his own face probably more than it showed on his friend’s. So Tony had decided a change of scenery was key. “Ya know, my Malibu lab is possibly better than this one here.”

“You have ten floors of R&D here.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t here that I built a particle accelerator in my basement.”

Pepper had sent Tony an email (because they weren’t talking yet, both too hurt to look each other in the eye) reminding him that the Malibu house was still under reconstruction, that he was needed in New York while they worked on moving the SI HQ over to the east coast, that the last time he ran away from his problems he’d given a terrorist his home address and a lot of people had almost died. Tony’s responding e-mail had simply said:

F U Pep i do what i want

and he had collected Bruce and jetted them across the country anyway.

But we’re talking about Tony Stark and Malibu, so it wasn’t nearly as relaxing as Bruce had been led to believe.

Tony's Malibu home was currently bare bones, hardly even livable. The garage and lab were finished, the kitchen was complete aside from having no cupboard doors, and the master bath was ready, but everything else was still under construction. There was a constant parade of workers in and out of the place, and even playing around with the particle accelerator and Tony’s other toys wasn’t enough to keep Bruce calmly distracted.

“Okay,” Tony said as he threw down the wrench he’d been holding. “Okay, fine, we’ll go to a hotel. Something low key, on the beach, you can do yoga in the sand and eat vegan hot dogs over an open flame.”

“Why does everyone think I’m a vegan?”

“What, are you not? Just a regular ‘ol vegetarian? One of those people that eats sea creatures, but not anything with a set of lungs?”

“Pescaterian,” Bruce supplied, his voice rough with exhaustion.

“Yeah, that!”

“No. Tony, I was a fugitive for almost a decade. Do you really think I had the means to force a restrictive diet on myself?”

Tony paused, thoughtful, but then ploughed right along. “Okay, point. Fine, you can eat regular hot dogs over an open flame. Lets get you outta here, Big Guy. We need a place with a hot tub. I haven’t had one put in here yet. Why haven’t I done that? Did I have one here before? I don’t remember. Lets go!”

Bruce knew that it was hard work for Tony to keep up this jovial, high energy charade, so he let the billionaire sweep him out of the lab and into some fancy car without putting up any resistance. Tony checked them into some beach resort only twenty minutes down the road, where they got their own bungalow on a private stretch of sand. There was a hot tub big enough to fit twelve and a fire pit and two large beds. Everything was expensive and beautiful and constructed to feel like some sort of Caribbean paradise. It all made Bruce feel a little out of place and a lot sick, but he kept his mouth shut. It would be better than being in the construction zone that was Tony’s unfinished home, and Tony needed to be away from everything.

But just being there wasn’t enough. After the whole Mandarin debacle, Tony and Pepper had gotten serious about each other, “For real this time,” Tony had told him, and that, along with the open heart surgery, had had Tony shying away from the parties and the women and the drinking that he was infamous for. And then after his chest had healed and Pepper had finally thrown in the towel, Bruce was there, distracting Tony with science and classic cult films. But Tony was still falling apart, and that stupid beach resort had him flashing back to days when he was younger and freer and far more intoxicated. Bruce saw it unfolding in Tony, knew that any day now he’d probably find a half dozen half naked girls in his rented bed, maybe a disco ball hung haphazardly from the ceiling fan, and copious amounts of alcohol being consumed and spilled all over the place.

He figured he couldn’t talk Tony out of it, so he just braced himself.

And then it happened. Four days after initially checking in, Bruce came back up from the beach to find Tony in the hot tub, eight beautiful young women with him, in the middle of what looked to be an orgy. He didn’t know when the girls got there, he thought he’d only been down by the water for an hour. But Tony was high as a kite on some substance Bruce didn’t want to ponder over, a brunette in his lap, her hips moving under the water in a way that made it impossible for her to not be riding his cock, a blonde straddling his face over the side of the hot tub, and two other girls pulling and clawing at any part of his body they could grasp.

Bruce watched, an ache settling right in the bottom of his lungs, and didn’t think a thing. The bodies in the hot tub rearranged, and Tony looked up and caught his eye. His grin was wide, manic, and his eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot. “Heeey, Big Man! C’mon, grab a girl and join the fun. Pleny’a go around!”

Bruce retreated into the bungalow without answering, closing and locking the sliding patio door behind him. He felt like something sharp and hard was lodged somewhere between his ribs, and it made him want to peel off his fucking skin. His brain had shut down, disengaged, but his body still moved to the entertainment system in the corner of the room. He fumbled around with the knobs until music started playing, and Bruce thought he should have felt satisfied when he recognized Jefferson Airplane, but he didn’t feel anything at all.

He had owned this album back before everything fell to shit, and it had a scratch that caused the CD to skip through the entirety of White Rabbit. He had hated it, but now it didn't feel the same to listen to that stupid song without the sk-sk-skipping. The ache grew as he realized he missed it, and he missed all his old college sweaters, and he missed Betty.

He was on the floor, pulling his hair, trying to stretch out his skin and make it more comfortable. He thought he could hear Tony climax outside, and he wanted to turn up the music, but his brain was off and his body had shut down and Bruce couldn’t move. He wondered what drugs Tony was on. He wondered if he’d accidentally taken some and was therefore also high as a kite. He didn’t feel like himself.

Who was himself anyway?

He didn’t feel like anything.

There was a tugging at his scalp, and his eyes felt prickly, and he was having a hard time breathing around that fucking _thing_ that was stabbing him in the ribs and holy shit he was so tired.

Bruce couldn’t remember the last time he slept.

He startled when he heard laughter, manic as Tony’s orgy grin had been, but relaxed when he realized it had come from him. Because wasn’t it funny? The last time he was on a beach he hadn’t been able to sleep either. Had he ever slept in his whole life? He wanted to, now. He wanted it almost more than he wanted to sink into one of those girls in the hot tub, almost more than he wanted Tony to be sober the next time he called Bruce Big Man, because that was a new nickname and he wanted it to be thoughtful, not drug induced. So Bruce dragged himself across the floor and into bed.

Not his own bed, of course, because he didn’t have a bed here, just a rented one. He climbed into Tony’s bed, because Tony owned everything he touched, and Tony owning things and letting Bruce use them was the closest Bruce would ever let himself get to owning his own things again. So he climbed into Tony’s bed -and did Tony just climax again? He better be using fucking condoms- and he lay there. His head on Tony’s pillow, his arms wrapped tightly around his own chest. And he closed his eyes. And he slept.

✧✧✧

When Bruce opened his eyes, he was in the bathtub. His arms throbbed and his chest ached and he couldn’t remember anything. He turned his head slightly, squinting painfully at the light, and recognized Tony sitting near him, back pressed against the side of the tub. “Are you wearing a fucking hazmat suit?”

The hood of the suit was down and pooled around Tony’s throat, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. “If you wanted to take a bloodbath, we could have robbed a hospital or something.” His voice was hoarse. It sounded painful.

Bruce didn’t understand. “What?”

“I’m trying to tell you that you didn’t have to go and try to chop your own goddamn hands off! Seriously, what the fuck Bruce? I thought we were having a good time!”

And Bruce didn’t know what Tony was talking about, but he knew that neither of them had really been having a good time, and he knew Tony knew it. “No you didn’t.”

Tony scrubbed at his face and heaved a sigh that expanded and then visibly deflated his whole chest. Bruce wondered how different it felt now that the Arc Reactor wasn’t there anymore. “Okay, fine. Both of us were drowning, but whatever. Doesn’t mean you go off and... And seriously? How fucked up _are_ you? Big Green almost didn’t come out and save your stupid ass! You almost fucking _died_ and I had to hunt down a fucking hazmat suit before I could even do anything to help you! What the actual fuck?!”

Bruce looked down at his wrists, held his arms out and watched himself rotate his wrists around, testing for movement and pain in his joints. He felt an exhaustion deep in his bones, but that was normal after a transformation. Everything was intact and functioning, if a little more tired than usual. "I don't remember anything. I just fell asleep."

"Yeah?" Tony sounded completely livid, but by this point Bruce had learned that Tony's anger was usually just a mask for fear or pain. "You usually try to hack off parts of your body when you sleepwalk?"

Bruce shrugged. "I'm not prone to sleepwalking, I don't think. The Other Guy almost didn't make an appearance? Maybe he took over my body and tried to kill me. Which makes it less like suicide and more like murder."

Tony heaved a sigh and let his head fall on to Bruce's shoulder. "Don't try and pin this on him, Big Guy. We both know that was all you." His voice was tired and it shook almost unnoticeably. "What were you thinking, anyway?"

"I'm not sure, but I think it was stupid."

"Tell me."

"I can't have sex." Bruce wasn't going to tell Tony about Jefferson Airplane or not fitting in his skin. He wasn't sure if those things made the situation better, or worse.

Tony laughed, and it was disbelieving and incredulous and sad. Then he fell silent, the side of his face still pressed into Bruce’s shoulder. Slowly, the engineer brought a hand up and rested it on Bruce’s neck, fingers rubbing gentle patterns into the skin and fine hair found there. “Bruce?”

“Hmm?”

“You don’t have to stay,” Tony’s voice was soft, nothing more than a murmur against the damp fabric of his shirt. “You don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to. You’re not trapped here, you know? You’re not stuck with me. But if you go, don’t go like that. Go, but don’t... Don’t _leave_. Don’t leave me. Okay?”

Bruce didn’t remember the act of trying to kill himself. He remembered freaking out, and then taking a nap. He couldn’t tell Tony that it wouldn’t happen again because he couldn’t pinpoint what triggered the episode or what exactly he thought it was that he was doing. But purposely hurting Tony, intentionally doing something that he knew would cause his best friend pain, was out of the question. Bruce rested his cheek on the top of Tony’s head, breathed in deep, and let his fingers skitter over his wrist. Counted his heartbeats. Exhaled. Whispered, “I still want to stay.”

He had almost fallen asleep right there in the tub when he heard Tony whisper back, “Good.”

✧✧✧

The little hut was empty, cold. He hadn’t started the fire that morning because what was the point? It’s not like he was going to feel the cold after he was finished here. Bruce wasn’t familiar with guns, or the different type of exit wounds, or anything. He wondered if after he was finished his tears would freeze to the chapped skin of his face. He wondered if he’d have a face left for his tears to freeze to.

When he’d first arrived to that little abandoned cabin in the heart of a frozen forest somewhere in the empty wilderness of Greenland, Bruce had propped up Betty’s photo by the woodstove. Now, her beautiful face was turned down and away from him, because he didn’t want her to watch him do what he was about to do.

He knew he was crying, silent, but verging on hysterical. His hands were shaking, his whole body trembling, but he didn’t feel cold. The gun was warm in his hand, warm only because he’d been clutching at it for more than an hour and his body temperature had been running hot since _it_ had been brought to life all those years ago.

Years.

God, had he really been living like this for years already? Had it honestly been years since the last time he saw Betty’s smile in the flesh, since the last time anyone had touched him without fear or repulsion? He sat at the edge of the cot he’d spent the last ten days curled up on, feet flat on the floor and gun in hand, thinking about those years. What had he been doing all that time? Running. Hiding. Playing a giant, elaborate game of Cops and Robbers. For a while he’d tried to tell himself that he was allowed to fight for his life, he was allowed to travel the world and explore and discover things. This circumstance didn’t mean he had to be inherently miserable. But Bruce had perfected the art of lying to himself long before he’d had to take to back roads to survive. Things were different now though, because he was too exhausted to keep the lies up.

Trying to control it? Too much effort and too little progress. Trying to eliminate it? It was infuriatingly resilient and far stronger than he was. Trying to work with it, compromise with it? He laughed at the thought. It didn’t compromise, it smashed everything in its path to get its way. There was no compromising with violence, of that Bruce had been certain since he was three years old. And now, after years of running and hiding and breaking everything he touched, Bruce was finally ready to admit that he only had one option.

He could be himself without it. But it could not be it without him. So.

He raised the gun and fitted it in his mouth. It was cold and it tasted like metal and had he not been so determined he would have recoiled in distaste. But it was too late for that now. He thought of Betty. Her smile, her laugh, the silk of her hair. The way her eyes used to light up when she looked at him. The way her lips tasted when he kissed her. He thought of freedom, of how he had always taken advantage of the fact that before this happened, he had had the ability to scream whenever he wanted. He had been able to make plans for the future. He thought about good, strong coffee, about wedding dresses and positive pregnancy tests and how his daughter would have been named Rebecca Grace. He thought of the Oregon coast, and houses with ponds and Juliette balconies. He thought of Betty. Her voice when she told him she loved him. Her hands in his hair after a nightmare. The way she’d glowed, absolutely glowed when they’d found out. A baby. Theirs. He thought of Betty.

He pulled the trigger.

✧✧✧

He heard faint rustling in the room around him, and he scowled but didn’t open his eyes. “Babe. Come back to bed.”

Betty laughed, soft and quiet in the early morning hours, not quite up to her regular volume until after two cups of coffee and a yoghurt cup. “Gotta go. Classes and all that academic stuff we signed on for when we got here.” She leaned over the side of the bed and pressed a kiss to the mess of curls on his head. “Get up. You’re going to be late.”

He blinked bleary eyes and reached for her, pulling her back into bed and down on top of him. “Call in sick. I will, too. Stay.”

She laughed again, a little more lively, but relaxed against him only momentarily. His arms tightened around her, a silent refusal to let her go. He felt her smile into the crook of his neck and he tangled his fingers into her hair. “Bruce, Love, I gotta-,”

“I could die like this,” he whispered to her, “and it’d be perfect.”

Her sigh was dramatic and annoyed and very fond. “I’m leaving now.” She kissed him hard, didn’t move. “I really am.”

He laughed, letting her go. He sat up and leaned against the headboard, watched as she straightened her blouse, adjusted her skirt, smoothed down her hair. She grinned at him in the mirror, and he reached for her again. Betty shook her head, but darted back for another quick kiss anyway. He swatted her ass playfully as she stood and turned, his eyes never leaving her as she moved for the bedroom door. He folded his hands behind his head as he called after her, “I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you walk away!”

She froze, then turned back to him at the threshold, mostly already out in the hallway. Her eyes gleamed with amusement as she asked, “Are you feeling okay, Bruce?”

He didn’t answer her question. His face softened, melting from cheeky playfulness to a quiet, almost sleepy sort of tenderness. “I love you, Elizabeth May Ross. I love you.”

Betty studied him, concern sparking in her chest. He wasn’t acting quite like himself this morning. But he looked fine. He’d slept well the night before, he didn’t have a fever, didn’t appear to be feeling ill at all. Still, she was hesitant to leave him alone. He fell into moods sometimes, that made him reckless and self destructive and manic. They always started with him feeling pleasantly happy though, carefree and relaxed. She remembered Amelia once asking her if Bruce was Bipolar, or manic depressive. Betty hadn’t had an answer. But she looked at him now and he was smiling softly at her. He seemed alright. So she smiled at him, told him, “I love you too, Bruce,” and made her way down the hall.

Bruce reclined back into bed. He didn’t want to go to work today, didn’t want to teach his first year physics class or go to the lab and fiddle around with those calculations for that radiation resistance serum the government had him working on. So he rolled over and pulled the bedspread up to his chin and curled up around himself. He was happy. He was so happy, he couldn’t remember ever being this happy before. But there was still a knot deep in his gut because he couldn’t help but think that it couldn’t last.

Something would happen, and everything good would be taken away from him. Because that was the pattern that his life followed. That was just what happened.

So Bruce was going to stay home today, and nurse his knot until Betty came home. He would kiss her, and maybe they’d make love, and the knot would loosen, and he would try not to worry. Because as much as Bruce was waiting for whatever bad thing that was to happen to happen, he refused to be the cause of it. He wouldn’t let his worry or his fear sabotage what he had. He would not get in his own way. Not this time, not with this. This, Betty, was the one thing in his life that he’d gotten right. He wasn’t going to fuck it up.


End file.
